The UCLA defense, which bottled up Aggies quarterback Kellen Mond in the second half last week, needs to continue to play strong against Hawai’i on Saturday at the Rose Bowl (Keith Birmingham/Staff Photographer)

Before running out of the tunnel at the Rose Bowl for his first game in nearly a year, Josh Rosen stood among his teammates, shifting his weight casually from left to right. He paused for a moment, looked directly into the FOX TV camera fixed on his face and winked.

Rosen’s return to the field started slowly as UCLA’s preseason slumber stretched into the first 2 1/2 quarters of its regular season, but the quarterback ignited the biggest comeback in school history. With Hawai‘i (2-0) coming to the Rose Bowl at 2 p.m. Saturday, the Bruins (1-0) hope they don’t have to survive another lackluster start.

“It’s a little bit of a break-in period,” Rosen said. “But we turned it around and hopefully this next game we can just basically play a fifth quarter of what we were at last week.”

WHEN UCLA HAS THE BALL

The UCLA offense passed its first test of the year, thanks to a fourth-quarter explosion from Rosen and tight end Caleb Wilson, but the running game skidded by with an incomplete grade.

The Bruins, who were the second-worst rushing team in the country last season, called only 19 running plays against Texas A&M as they were forced to chase the game from a 34-point deficit. The final 2.5 yards per rush is even worse than last season’s 2.9-yard mark that ranked 127th out of 128 FBS schools.

“We have to run the ball better,” offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch said. “Regardless, we have to run the ball more, we have to not put ourselves in positions where we don’t convert on third down. If we did convert on third down, then we’d be able to run the ball better, then we’d be able to really see if we could get that run game going.”

The Bruins were just 2 for 9 on third down in the first half. Of their 19 called runs, 12 came before halftime.

Soso Jamabo led the team in rushing with seven carries, 46 yards and a critical touchdown in the third quarter that was the first of five in a row. The junior from Plano, Texas, also caught a critical fourth-down conversion on UCLA’s game-winning drive and proved to be a worthy pass protector in the backfield in the second half after he struggled with the skill early in his career.

WHEN HAWAII HAS THE BALL

On the first drive of his first college game, Jaelan Phillips ran unblocked into the backfield ready to make a play. Instead of notching the first tackle for loss of his UCLA career, the freshman defensive end just swiped at air after Texas A&M running back Keith Ford cut his run back to gain 11 yards.

Welcome to college, freshman.

Phillips was one of two true freshmen to start on defense for the Bruins on Sunday along with cornerback Darnay Holmes. While Phillips had only one tackle in the first half, which came in the second quarter after Ford had already sliced the UCLA defense for 12 yards on the play, he started to live up to his five-star hype after halftime with three more solo tackles, 1.5 sacks and two passes batted down at the line of scrimmage.

The growth of UCLA’s young defensive line, which has only four upperclassmen, was critical in containing the Texas A&M running game in the second half and will face another big challenge in Hawai‘i running back Diocemy Saint Juste, who ran for 202 yards last weekend.

“That was their first time playing in a college game and they had to get their jitters out for the first few drives,” said senior Jacob Tuioti-Mariner, who has the most career starts of any defensive lineman with 11. “Just seeing them being able to refocus in and kind of live back to what they’ve been playing, which is football, all their lives and having all those young guys step it up was really important for us.”

The defensive line also got debuts from redshirt freshman Osa Odighizuwa and redshirt sophomore Chigozie Nnoruka, a junior college transfer. Nnoruka made the game-winning tackle on fourth-and-10, dragging Texas A&M quarterback Kellen Mond down 1 yard short of a first down.

“He was just a hero right there,” Tuioti-Mariner said. “He played it very smart.”

Thuc Nhi Nguyen has covered UCLA for the Southern California News Group since 2016. A proud Seattle native, she majored in journalism and mathematics at the University of Washington. She likes graphs, animated GIFs and superheroes.

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